Apple's App Store? It's "A store [that] for the most part people can trust", according to Phil Schiller, the company's veep of marketing and all-around amusing guy on the front bench at Apple.

In an interview with Arik Hessendahl Hesseldahl of BusinessWeek, Schiller explains that "you and your family and friends can download applications from the store, and for the most part they do what you'd expect, and they get onto your phone and you get billed appropriately, and it all just works."

In that, Schiller is absolutely correct. There are rogue worms which infect jailbroken iPhones [cracked so they can work on any network and any app can be installed; this is not the same as those which have been sold from semi-authorised resellers] and, if you haven't changed the root password, will access your private history and text messages and might divert you to phishing or malware sites. Which is suddenly a good reason not to jailbreak your iPhone.

Schiller compares Apple's role to that of a retailer determining which products line store shelves. "Whatever your favorite retailer is, of course they care about the quality of products they offer," he says. "We review the applications to make sure they work as the customers expect them to work when they download them."

With 100,000 applications on the store, and about 10% getting turned back, and only 1% of the returned ones have some outlying problem. (Apparently those which might help you cheat at a casino aren't allowed. Those which improve your game are OK. Who knew Apple had created such a moral universe?)

Schiller acknowledges that you don't have to be over-zealous about the potential illegal use of trademarks - especially Apple's own. After all, it's appearing on Apple's own product. That was the problem for Rogue Amoeba, the Apple software developer which had seen its non-trademark-infringing sound app get held up.

Schiller tells BusinessWeek:

"We need to delineate something that might confuse the customer and be an inappropriate use of a trademark from something that's just referring to a product for the sake of compatibility," he says. "We're trying to learn and expand the rules to make it fair for everyone."

And hey! Rogue Amoeba's app has now been approved. It seems Phil Schiller might have some heft at Apple after all.